Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (27 page)

Jon:
It’s so important to remove preciousness and ownership. You have to invest everybody in the success of the show, and to let them feel good about their contribution to it without becoming the sole proprietor of a joke. There has to be an understanding that that may be a great joke, but it might not serve the larger intention, or the narrative, of the show. You have to make sure that everybody feels invested without feeling that type
of ownership. The other side of it is doing twelve episodes is a very different process from having to set up something that can serve a hundred and sixty episodes, and I think you can get away with more volatility in that other environment.

Judd:
And the storytelling requires that people go to some deep place, emotionally, which makes them vulnerable and raw. And on a show like
Larry Sanders
, you had the sense that the episodes are going to hang around for a long time, and be seen more over and over again, so you really can’t bear to have a crappy one.

Jon:
Correct. The fact that
The Daily Show
is ephemeral makes the process so much more forgiving. The idea that you’re crafting twelve unique, careful episodes is very different than the feeling of, like,
Okay, well, that one sucked, but who’s on tomorrow?
It gives you a cushion you might not have elsewhere.

Judd:
Looking back, one could say that the final season of
Larry Sanders
is almost perfect, in its story line, with the young guy, played by you, pushing Garry out.

Jon:
It’s
All About Eve.

Judd:
And it is exactly what happened with Leno and Conan.

Jon:
We created this template. People used to say to me,
Larry Sanders
is a satire on the dark underbelly of show business. And I always felt like, Oh, you have
no idea.
You have no idea of the darkness of the underbelly of show business.

Judd:
How has the way that you look at
The Daily Show
changed over the years? Do you have a different sense of its purpose now?

Jon:
I never think about its purpose. I think about its process, and that has changed dramatically. In other words, the evolution has been less about: What is our job here, or what is our purpose of being here? It’s about: How can we make the show better, more distinct, with different voices? The two areas where I think the show has evolved the most are through the integration of new technologies, obviously—you know, search engines that didn’t exist when we started, and that help us find material. When we got here,
we used to cut the show in an online room. You could use maybe five rolls for an act and if you cut that montage and you got one of them wrong, you had to go back and start again. And I also think we have a better understanding of the diversity of voice. We’ve moved it from more of a strict, periodic structure into something that could become more essayistic.

Judd:
Was there ever a moment when you realized,
Oh shit, people are actually paying attention to my point of view a lot more closely than I thought they would be?

Jon:
There were two moments where that occurred, in some measure. One was winning an Emmy. That got in my head a little bit, feeling like I suddenly had a responsibility, that we had to live up to this thing even if I couldn’t fully define what that thing was.

Judd:
Sometimes I liken it to Chappelle in the sense that, for some reason, the responsibility of the show took him away from the idea of having fun, and enjoying himself.

Jon:
The sense I got from Dave was it wasn’t so much the responsibility as he wasn’t sure if the show was being received in the way it was intended. I think Dave felt a responsibility, as a black performer, to live up to a responsibility and to not give people—you know, it’s sort of what we call the bucket-of-blood laugh. George Carlin and I used to talk about that a little bit because he would do those shows where he’d be like, “You know, we only bomb brown people. We only bomb brown people except when we bombed Germany they were white people and that’s because they were going, you know, because they were bombing people and that’s our fucking job. That’s our fucking job.” It’s a great bit but you definitely felt, in the audience, that there were some people going, “Yeah, that’s our fucking job!” And for George, it created this sense of “Oh they’re not taking this in the way that I intended it.” And in some ways you have to let that go because it’s something you can’t control. You can only control the intention of the execution, but I think for Dave it became more complicated than that.

Judd:
I get it, too, because every time I do stand-up, I wake up the next morning and I feel this shame that is so intense, like I was drunk all night and I don’t remember what I did.

Jon:
Really?

Judd:
I feel embarrassed at even having had an opinion or a thought.

Jon:
But isn’t that the whole—I mean, there’s a certain arrogance in us entering this business. There’s an arrogance in the idea of saying,
Where’s that spotlight shining? Oh, it’s up on the stage? Well shit, why don’t I walk up there? What’s in here that’s going to amplify my voice? Is that a microphone? All right, so I got a light shining on me, and my voice is amplified and you’re all looking at me. Well, let me stand here and give you something worthwhile for ten minutes.
But I don’t think it goes much further than that, if that makes sense. After that, it becomes a question of, does it resonate?

Judd:
What effect does raising your kids have on the mechanics of getting all your work done and presenting your point of view with the world? How old are your kids now?

Jon:
Ten and eight.

Judd:
I have one about to turn seventeen and one about to turn twelve.

Jon:
Oh dear, do they still like you?

Judd:
They have to act like they like me because they still need me for some driving. But we’re right at the end of that.

Jon:
A little gas money might still keep you in the loop.

Judd:
Maybe. But in some way, you must have perfected some sense of balance between your time at home and your time at work—which seems impossible, given how demanding your show is.

Jon:
I have done my best, but it’s still not satisfactory, especially as the kids get older. It’s different when they begin to share and experience things that are more complex. It’s one thing to, you know—I have this letter up in my office. It’s something my daughter Maggie wrote to me. It says, and this was after we were down the Jersey Shore, bodysurfing. I think I tanked it and smashed into the sand. It says, “Daddy, I know you are a good writer. You’re a good surfer, too. When you got on that big wave, you got hurt bad. I know you saw a lot of nature. You’re a great dad. Love, Maggie.”
That is, like, beautiful. It’s simple. But now, they’re older and they are beginning to articulate things in a much more complex way, and you need to be there more. And nine-to-nine is a shitty schedule for that kind of thing. So I’d like to say that I’ve achieved that balance, but the truth is, I probably haven’t.

Judd:
The conversation I get into in our house is: “Dad, we have money, so why don’t you stop working so much?”

Jon:
Because I’m an obsessive weirdo?

Judd:
And what if Ebola happens in a much larger way and we really need to get the compound solidified?

Jon:
Exactly. You are just preparing. I also think, to some extent, you are where you came from. No matter where you end up, no matter what you achieve, on some level, you feel like you belong in a basement underneath a Middle Eastern restaurant telling jokes. That’s never out of you. Leno used to have this. He’d always say, “I never spend any of my stand-up money.” He’d been doing
The Tonight Show
for like twenty years, and he’d say, “I don’t spend my stand-up money. That goes right to the bank because you don’t want to mess with that. You never know what’s going to happen.” And you’re like, “Yeah, I guess the collapse of Western society maybe, but I think you’re in pretty good shape.” It’s a psychosis more than anything else.

Judd:
I know that when I started doing stand-up again, and I would get eighty dollars for my Saturday night spot at the Comedy Cellar, I held on to that money with a joy that I don’t get when the
Drillbit Taylor
residuals come in.

Jon:
Because we’re psychotic and, at some level, not living with a real sense of things. But also, you know, I like working, man. I just wish I was better at it. One of the nice things about doing this show versus stand-up is that there is a moment of Zen at the end of it. There’s a good night. You’re done. With stand-up, you’re never done. You always feel like you’ve got to keep that notebook by the bed. And so you stop experiencing anything. You just exist purely as an observer, constantly trying to figure out
if I’m going to be able to work a bit out of this. It’s a different way of approaching life. It’s exhausting.

Judd:
How is it that your family’s not angry at you?

Jon:
You’ll have to talk to them. I think there’s a certain normalcy. My kids have never known me not to have this schedule.

Judd:
Do you enjoy work in the same way after all these years? Has the pleasure of it changed? Because what I find most shocking, as someone who burns out—I mean, we did thirteen episodes of
The Ben Stiller Show
and I literally prayed for cancellation in my room at night—I can’t believe how vital and alive your show is, and with no sense of burnout.

Jon:
It’s hard. In some ways, I think it’s cyclical. I liken it to batters in a slump. Sometimes you just have to simplify, return to basics. You know,
All right, well, I’m not hitting right now.
That’s when I feel the worst, when I feel like I can’t—the inspiration’s just not there or you feel like you can’t solve the problem with the joke. You can’t elevate. That’s when you feel the shittiest and so, in those moments, you just have to think like a baseball player:
Okay, if I’m not hitting, at the very least I’m going to run out every ground ball as hard as I can. Or I’m going to do the best I can in the field. I’m going to try and make up for my lack of creativity until, hopefully, I hustle my way out of that slump.
But I will say this: Through it all, I have always retained the ability to feel the joy of the funny. When somebody comes up with something really funny or we hit a jag where it’s clicking, that still feels like that wave you’ve been chasing. It can still make me jump up and down like a little kid. That’s what you chase.

Whenever I sit down with Key and Peele—which is fairly often, and we’re usually talking about a screenplay we’re working on together, and who knows if we’ll ever finish it—I think:
I wish I had a Key or a Peele in my life.
The only two people I’ve seen who seem as close in their friendship and sensibility are Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I mean, where’s my Peele? Where’s my Key? Why the hell am I sitting alone in this room?

Anyway, these guys are hilarious and, maybe more important, they seem to be having the best time in their work, and with the fact that they get to do it together. They are funny and sharp on all subjects, but I can’t think of anybody who has been better on the subject of race in America. They have found that magic formula of making people laugh until they shit themselves while also saying things that need to be said right now.

Judd Apatow:
So you’ve just finished shooting the show, and you did two seasons
at once?

Keegan-Michael Key:
Yeah, pretty much.

Judd:
That’s crazy. Was it a nightmare? Two-thirds of the way in, did you go, “This is a terrible decision,” or did you not hit that level of suffering?

Key:
Some things fell through the cracks. We’d be on set, trying to fix things, but then we’d have a hiatus week, and then we’d have to shoot something for Comedy Central on the hiatus week, but while that’s happening there’s always still a stream of emails that come through saying, “Here’s the second version of this cut, of this episode,” or, “Do you guys want to give notes on this?” And there’s just no time to weigh in on all that stuff.

Jordan Peele:
No, at some point you’ve just got to go—

Key:
Yeah, you’ve got to delegate. Trust people and delegate.

Judd:
Do you have people that you could trust with a full episode? Could you say, “I’m so burned out, I am not even going to watch this one,” and have faith that it’s going to be solid?

Key:
Yeah. I’ve watched episodes on TV with my wife at night and I’ll see little cuts of things and go, “Oh, that was a nice little touch.”

Peele:
There was an episode where an old edit got used by accident, though.

Key:
Oh, shit. That’s true.

Peele:
Something got by and I didn’t…I was so pissed. They’re fixing it now for all the future airings and stuff, but I couldn’t blame anybody because I didn’t screen it.

Judd:
Yeah, you remember those things forever. What level of control freak are you guys at?

Peele:
I feel like, in the beginning, I wanted to be part of every single stage of the process. There was a fear that it wouldn’t go right. When I was at
MADtv
, it was crazy. I felt like I was putting good work in and then it would somehow get corrupted: Some edit would get made or a sketch I wrote that I thought was genius wouldn’t get picked. That whole mentality made me a real control freak. But you know, like we were saying, this time we had no choice but to let go of the reins a little.

Key:
I’m—to my detriment—a very trusting Pollyanna, and that can lead to times when a piece of work suffers, so I try to be a little bit more of a control freak. But my thing is—and this is not necessarily the best process—but, once we get on set, I know Jordan and I can fix anything. We can fix anything on set.

Judd:
In the writing?

Key:
Yeah, the writing, but even in the performance.

Peele:
With this double season, when they requested twenty-one episodes, I think our first response was, like,
We’re going to kill ourselves. We’re going
to kill ourselves working this hard.
One fear we had—and we had a serious discussion about this—was that we’ve been designing the whole process of this show so we kind of can’t fail, but all of a sudden we’re doing twice as many episodes. And one little dip in quality at this point is, I think, a legacy-affecting dip. Same thing if we get better. Plateauing, we’re okay with, but it’s not great. So that was the big thing: What is the show going to do? Dip, plateau, or get better? And I still can’t tell what it is.

Judd:
During the last season of
Kids in the Hall
, it felt like they had so burned through their ideas that they went to some other crazy, absurd level. It was definitely hit-and-miss, but there were things in it that were so insanely funny—things you could only have written if you were burned out.

Key:
Right, exactly. And to be honest with you, I actually think the second half of our fourth season, we will not plateau. I believe that it’s going to be better. Because when you’ve been working with someone for eleven years, you get to a place where there’s going to be something only you can do. Like Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. They’re at a place where only they can do something that way, and I feel like we have things only we can do, and so it will excel and it will grow. It will grow.

Judd:
It must be a big trial by fire for you guys, as friends, to be under that much pressure. Especially with this season getting so much positive attention, and you guys being on the cover of
Time
magazine and everything. That’s a lot to have on your plate at once.

Key:
It’s been interesting. There are fellow writers who were early adopters of the show, people who have been on board since day one. But more interesting to me are the regular people, who don’t have anything to do with our industry, who have gotten on board. I want to meet those people. I think a lot of those late adopters are probably biracial like us and said,
Oh my gosh, here is a show for me.
That’s why the quality has to stay up, because you’ve got new people watching the show now. It’s like a series of tidal waves—and in the midst of it, you keep walking up to podiums and receiving awards and just going, “Thanks,” and then: “Oh, I’ve got to get back to the office now.”

Peele:
It is weird, but all the cool accolades have really beaten the
enormous
paychecks in coming to us.

Judd:
Right. You’re not making as much money as your accolades would suggest, and eventually, you just get pissed at everyone.

Key:
Just steaming, staring at your Peabody Award, like,
Those fuckers. This system is not working.

Judd:
Cosby’s made so much more money than we have. And it makes the accolades feel like some kind of weird accident. But I think the next couple of years, it will continue to sink in. Like:
Oh, this was a crazy time for us.

Judd:
What really sticks out?

Key:
The Peabody Award, don’t you think?

Judd:
That’s a great award. Your program shows that prejudices and the way people were and are ignorant are ridiculous and should be mocked. Like my daughter, she’s mad that we even have to talk about homophobia because she doesn’t understand how anyone would feel that way. She actually gets upset. But that’s because her generation grew up saying homophobia is stupid, racism is stupid, and so it’s not even in their heads. I think comedy has helped affect that. Do you get that sense?

Peele:
Our target demo was teenagers, and so we were forced to make a show that was relevant to them. A lot of the work we did in that first season was really about: What
is
this show? Every sketch we chose had to help us define what the whole point of this thing was. We are doing sketches that could only be done today, things that wouldn’t have been relevant several years ago. It’s like what you’re saying: Racism still exists, and it’s ridiculous, but there are still parts of the country where the youth have just a completely different view of race, and we want to bring that conversation into the larger culture.

Key:
That’s really the biggest, most significant paradigm shift: Kids don’t look at race, they look at culture. I don’t think they know that they’re looking at culture, but they’re co-opting each other’s culture and it’s starting to
mush together, whereas for me or for someone older than me, everything was always about the color of your skin.

Judd:
But now it seems like it is a little bit more about class?

Key:
It does. And when I say culture, I mean class. As in, you can afford to be part of a certain culture. For a lot of people, their culture is defined by where they are socioeconomically, and for decades, rich kids have coopted poorer kids’ cultures because they were bored or whatever.

Judd:
My daughter is at this nice private school, but there are a lot of scholarship students there, too. She says that the school is very aggressive about wanting everyone to hang out with each other. And when they don’t, they assume it’s because of race, but she says it’s because of class, that it’s uncomfortable for the kids who aren’t living at the same economic level to integrate. And that kids from similar class backgrounds tend to hang out together.

Key:
Yeah. My wife and I drove out to Riverside yesterday to watch my best friend’s oldest son play for his Pop Warner football team. They lost the game by a field goal, and it was a heartbreaker. My friend is from Rancho Palos Verdes and all the kids on the other team were from San Bernardino, and as we were driving home, my wife said, “Well, those kids really need it. Good for them.” And I feel that all the way. You know, I’m from Detroit. It doesn’t matter when New York City wins a sports championship. But when Detroit wins a sports championship, it actually
means
something. We need the money for infrastructure, we need the boost. This is the same thing. The majority of those kids were African American, and they’re from some really bad, downtrodden school district in the Mount Baldy area. It’s different than kids from Rancho Palos Verdes. And they’re out there, screaming and running around the field and jumping up and down. It means something for them.

Judd:
I think it means so much whenever you see somebody that you relate to in whatever way kicking ass and succeeding. I’m so interested in this with the president, and how people look at him.

Key:
Yeah, and trying to figure out what box to put him in. You have to understand that if you’re going to put him in a box, you should put him
in the child-of-a-single-mother, lower-middle-class box. That’s the box he belongs in. You know, as Jordan has said in the past, I sometimes think we have a show because Obama got elected. That pushed these issues to the forefront, and people have had to address it. What happens when a person’s mixed?

Judd:
The country’s completely mixed, but you still see the last vestiges of some things—

Peele:
There’s such a diversity of experiences, and having a sketch show now has been a great way to explore it all, because there’s no single comment to be made that’s going to sum it up. Often we’ll make a sketch and go, “You know what? You know who’s going to love this sketch? Hispanic break dancers are going to love it.” And then this one, “This one is for the black people in Ferguson that need this story told as a reminder to everyone else.”

Key:
Right, that this is going on, and that we know that’s going on, and that everybody else needs to know that that’s still going on. Whenever people stop to talk to me on the street, I’m always like, “I’m sorry, I’m so curious, you’re going to have to tell me what sketch hooked you in. I want to know what demographic you’re coming from.”

Peele:
In the beginning, we really latched on to being biracial as something that made us similar to the president, but also as the thing that made us relevant and hadn’t been explored. As the show has gone on and progressed, though, the more important thing is that we’re able to tell the stories of anybody. We can get away with going anywhere because we’ve gone everywhere.

Key:
This is so lofty, but it feels like we ended up writing an American show.

Judd:
Absolutely. And not just where America is now; it’s also where America’s going.

Peele:
Part of the interesting thing about this whole conversation is the fact that I think we consider ourselves kind of like modern-day jesters. Our job is to be a mirror for everything that’s going on, and I think that if people
had the sense that we were just purely in the president’s pocket or whatever, we’d lose credibility.

Judd:
I love that your comedy doesn’t seem to come from insecurity or self-hatred. I could be completely wrong—you may hate yourselves—but my sense of humor came from feeling like I was not like all these other people and it sucked. It made me mad at the world. But I don’t get the sense that you guys came from the same type of emotional experience. What was the thing that made you funny?

Peele:
I think we both had success early on that probably helped us not have a disgruntled vibe. But I think our ability to be chameleons comes from an early sense of identity crisis.

Key:
I agree. That was our survival mechanism.

Peele:
Keegan grew up in Detroit and I grew up in New York, both fairly cosmopolitan places. But we both still lived in a culture where being a black person who sounds white is a recipe for a beating.

Key:
I mean, if you go way back—primordial, right—as human beings, we have had to categorize things to stay alive. Eat the brown one, don’t eat the green one. So some of that primal stuff kicks in for people and they go, You’re not fitting in my box. And that’s why you get beaten up, because you scare them and they just happen to be bigger than you and know how to throw a football. But I think for me, humor is definitely borne of the insecurity in being adopted and being biracial and saying, “I just got to figure out what the gig is that will allow me to feel good emotionally and survive the beatings.”